Mindfulness

In today’s globally active digital world, the pressure to be active online 24/7 to manage incoming emails, texts and conference calls, makes it easy to experience situations where we feel overloaded and exhausted by deadlines. We often become so absorbed in our daily work that we forget about ourselves completely.

Organisations are increasingly seeing a rise in the costs of absenteeism, presenteeism and staff turnover associated with stress and mental health problems. Our goal is to bring mindfulness to the workplace to obtain greater employee engagement and wellbeing, which in turn leads to a more productive workplace, with happy and motivated employees.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is all about changing your mindset and being aware of what is happening in this very moment, in a non-judgemental way, that integrates your mind, heart and body. In theory, that may sound simple, but it requires a lot of practice to train our minds to respond to what we are thinking.

How rarely are we aware of what we are thinking and whether our thoughts have drifted off to feel remorse about the past or worry over the future?

How rarely do we recognise the way we feel and whether we are angry, sad, ashamed, or embarrassed?

How rarely are we aware of the signals that our body sends us, whether its headaches, rapid heartbeats or chest pain?

What are the benefits of mindfulness?

According to 2016 report Building a Case for Mindfulness in the Workplace by The Mindfulness Initiative, mindfulness is fundamentally connected to several functions in the workplace, which, with training and the practice of techniques, can lead to greater improvements in three key areas:

Wellbeing and Resilience - building resilience gives us the ability to deal with difficult and stressful situations while we develop discernment to identify between activities that nurture or deplete internal resources

Enhanced working relationships - improved relationships at work support collaboration and improve employees’ resilience in the face of challenges

Leadership – ‘metacognition’ provides leaders with the capacity to observe their thoughts, feelings, sensations and impulses as they are being experienced by others

Decision-making – reduces the sunk-cost bias (our tendency to continue with a project due to the cost of time or money invested, even though it is no longer viable) and improves the information-gathering processes required for decision making

Creativity and Innovation – Leads to improved focus and the ability to filter out distractions; increased idea generation from divergent thinking; and flexible thinking that disrupts habitual habits leaving us receptive to new ideas and ways of thinking